Anyone Else Worked on a Commodore 64?

I am listening to The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk. It was a talk given at the 25th Chaos Communication Conference last year; it was 64 minutes long with 256 slides (which if you're a geek you already can see the in-humor of that).

What was so great about the C64? It was no doubt one of the most flexible, hackable systems created for home users. That's probably the single biggest driver in creating a fanbase for the machine that persists today (don't believe me? The thing was released in 1982, and if you click here you can go to a website that is reportedly hosted on a Commodore 64. Yes, hosted. It's a web server running on a Commodore 64.

My first personal computer was a Commodore 128. I remember typing in my own BASIC programs (the built-in ROM booted straight to a BASIC interpreter), loading applications from five and a quarter inch floppies, and with the right key combination, booting to a Commodore 64 mode. My first introduction to the early incarnation of the Internet was by connecting an external modem...which really is just a device for modulating a digital signal to an analog signal, not necessarily something that connects to a phone line even though that's the most common use...and connecting it to a 2-meter amateur radio transceiver so I could hop from node to node on the digital amateur radio network, exchanging messages with other amateur radio enthusiasts and using a terminal to "chat" with people. Messages could also be passed through special gateways into different wired networks of bulletin boards and what was back then the fledgling Internet! At the time this was pretty exciting!

Listening to this talk and watching the slides brought back some memories...

Commodore will always probably be known as the company that screwed up a great platform, the Amiga, which again was used beyond what most systems would have lasted in the industry. Anyone remember the show Babylon 5? Seaquest? Max Headroom? The computer effects were rendered on Commodore Amiga systems. It also was ahead of its time for giving home users advanced (but affordable) sound, graphics, and multitasking abilities; this was a continuation of the tradition started with the C64, except for the multitasking ability.

The talk itself is all about the C64; it's in-depth at times, other times humorous, and the information covers a variety of topics from bugs in the processor to comparisons of how graphics looked in the beginning (with a Christmas graphics demo released in '82) to what advanced graphics were appearing years later to a humorous dig at Microsoft's Bill Gates ("If he can program the 6502, so can you." Apparently Gates included an Easter Egg in the code for the version of BASIC encoded on the C64.)

Parts of it will go over the heads of the majority of people out there (you see some assembly code, some diagrams of chips used on the C64...) but other parts will appeal to anyone with fond memories of this old but venerable technology. If you have an hour to spend reminiscing then check out this video!